This is a course syllabus for an M.A. seminar I convened in 2006 and repeated in 2008, based on earlier seminars I taught at the University of San Diego. I don’t know if I will ever be teaching this seminar again; if I do, I will certainly add more selections from what is now called the ‘post-9/11 novel’. Obvious examples would include Ian McEwan’s Saturday, John Updike’s Terrorist and Don Dellilo’s Falling Man. I would also recommend two novels written from an Arabic point of view: The Sirens of Baghdad, by Yamina Khadra, and Last Night of a Damned Soul by Slimaine Benaissa. Many of my fellow lefties are also enamoured by Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist; but apart from admiring the work’s artistic merits, such as they are, I think the book is a load of guff.

Theoretical/critical literature since 2006, it seems to me, has not been as interesting as fiction since then. I have myself written a couple of contributions to the literature: ‘Terrorism and the Novel, 1970-2001’ (Poetics Today 29.3 (2008), 387-436) and ‘Milton, the Gunpowder Plot, and the Mythography of Terror’, Modern Language Quarterly, 68.4 (2007), 461-93), and they may be a load of guff too. But be that as it may, the problem in the critical community seems twofold:

1. We don’t seem to know from what position to conceptualise the phenomena of terrorism just now. Novelists can dramatize this ‘not knowing’, but critics are obliged to try to move beyond not knowing into knowledge. But from where are we to search for this knowledge? From what position are we able to put into action our desire to know? And what, after all, is this desire? A lot of critics (many of whose works are collected in the anthology, Terror and the Postcolonial: A Concise Companion (Wiley-Blackwell 2009) seem determined to vaunt their desire not to know. For ‘knowledge’ of ‘terrorism’ these days (which they prefer in fact to call, more ambiguously, ‘terror’) is the knowledge of power and authority, of anti-terror, is it not? It is knowledge of terror and the terrorist as ‘the other’, ‘the enemy’ – and who has the desire to know this? Who has the desire to approach the phenomenon of terrorism merely from the position of rejectionism? What could possibly be known from that?

2. We don’t seem to know what our history with regard to terrorism is. Where are we now with regard to a history where terrorist violence has had a decisive impact on political and social life, on how we think about this life, and how we imagine ourselves going forward into the future? How are we associated, as creatures in time and of time, and as residents of post-post modern moment in political and social history, with the figure of terrorist violence, and the threats, hopes, disasters and revolutions that that figure has come to represent?

In my new book, Terrorism Before the Letter, I try to answer these questions, or at least to provide a kind of way forward in answering them. And I try to do this by squarely looking at the past, at the figures of the past, during a period when terrorist violence was rife but no one seemed to 'know' it. Terrorism did not have a name, or a theory attached to it. But terrorism was decisive for political and social history in England, Scotland and France alike.